Four Faces
One: 2013
She once saw a woman shot to death at a nightclub. This was back in her early 20s, back when she was drunk all the time, back when she was still sleeping with men. The place was called the Phantom Limb, a dimly lit hipster dive in the Marigny district of New Orleans, the interior decor consisting of old prosthetic arms, legs, hands and feet that dangled from the ceiling on wires. Sometimes, she’d just sit there, sipping vodka gimlets and watching artificial body parts vibrate in the rafters, a danse macabre set to the blare of indie rock. Other times, she’d try to make eye contact with women sitting at the opposite end of the bar, some fifty feet away. At that safe distance, she told herself, she could flirt without consequence. It was a game, a test run for something she wasn’t quite sure she wanted. All her feelings seemed unreal in those days, emanating from something she couldn't see or touch, something no longer there, something similar to the name of that bar. Most women didn’t even know she was staring at them, and those who happened to catch her gaze didn’t hold it long, though a few seemed to offer a look of acknowledgement, or maybe even interest. What would she do if one headed her way for an actual conversation? So far, there’d been no need to figure it out. In her drunken haze, those far-off women seemed like hallucinations. Then one night she locked eyes with a fellow patron sitting all alone at the far end of the bar with a round face, a downturned mouth and an expression that seemed sad and hopeful at the same time.
Somewhere in that crowded room, a disturbance erupted, men’s angry voices rising over the music. Both women glanced at the fracas—somebody pushing somebody else in the darkness, somebody pushing back, then curses, shouts, threats, the usual stuff of a late Friday night—before they turned once more to each other. Silver-tinted pixie cut, earrings that looked like dangling silver coins, ice that shone silver in her highball glass, which she raised slowly to her lips and, without looking away, took a sip and smiled, an intimate smile, a conspiratorial smile, a lover’s smile, a smile that lingered even after the burst of fire, bam, bam, bam, even after she started to fall.
That instant between the shooting and the falling would haunt the onlooker for years, that instant when life and death mingled on the woman’s face. Still holding her highball glass, she did not look afraid or even surprised but exultant, expectant, ready to rise up, push through the crowd and introduce herself to the stranger across the bar.
Two: 2015
The number of an unknown caller from Florida appeared on her phone. Because she had recently joined Alcoholics Anonymous and was trying to live in the moment, trying to pay attention to the little things, she decided to answer. The woman on the other end had the calmest voice she’d ever heard, as silky and subtle and warming as vodka.
“Am I speaking with Deedra? Deedra Miller?”
The calmest voice she’d ever heard turned out to belong to an assistant coroner at the Treasure Coast County Medical Examiner’s Office, who informed her that the body of a woman had washed up on a nearby beach. A tentative identification had been made, based on a driver's license found in the room of a guest who’d gone missing from a local hotel.
“We have reason to believe,” said the woman, “that the decedent is your mother.”
Three days later, after a plane trip from New Orleans to West Palm Beach with a three-hour layover in Atlanta, during which she broke down and had a couple drinks but still managed to make her connecting flight, Deedra was leaning over a gurney in the medical examiner’s body-viewing room, staring into the wide-open eyes of a corpse.
“I can’t be sure,” she said. “Not a hundred percent, anyway.”
“Take your time.”
The voice came from behind her, the calmest one she’d ever heard. “Drowning victims,” that voice softly intoned, “tend to have an otherworldly appearance.”
The dead woman did indeed look like some alien from a science-fiction film, her face crimson and bloated and gelatinous. At first glance a few seconds earlier, Deedra had thought she might vomit all over the viewing room. But now the nausea had passed and something else was bothering her, something even more disorienting. She could pick out individual features of the person on the gurney—the familiar brown eyes, the wild tangle of curly hair, the birthmark below the right ear (a blemish which, if she looked in the mirror at this moment, she would see on her own neck). But the face as a whole belonged to a stranger, a person she’d walk right by if they passed on the street.
“Is it weird,” Deedra said, “to recognize someone and yet not recognize her at all?”
“You’re asking the wrong person,” the assistant coroner replied with a languid chuckle. “I happen to have something called visual agnosia—face blindness. To be honest, I’m lucky if I ever recognize anybody.”
“Even people close to you?” Deedra inquired, studying the expressionless mouth of the corpse and wondering why she felt no emotion.
“I once took part in an autopsy for the victim of a car wreck. Removed and weighed her internal organs—heart, lungs, liver. Only later did I discover that she was one of my good friends. We’d met for coffee just a few days before the accident.”
“How awful.”
“The condition is hereditary, a gift from my mom,” the assistant coroner said with another unhurried laugh. “But she gave me lots of good things, as well.”
“I haven’t seen my mother in years,” Deedra said, reaching out and touching the forehead of the corpse, its skin cool, chalky, a foreign substance.
“Perhaps she no longer matches your memory.”
“No, she’s unchanged. Frozen in time.”
She wasn’t making sense, even to herself. Feeling the need to explain—or perhaps to seek an explanation—she turned to the assistant coroner, a tall woman whose green eyes were as calm as her voice. Had she met this person somewhere before? The face was not animated or exotic, not even beautiful, really, or at least not in any identifiable way. Yet there was something about her, a presence that felt familiar—far more familiar, it now occurred to her, than that of the dead woman. And almost before she was aware of it, the words were flowing from her so effortlessly that it felt less like a story than a song, a breathless sea ballad about a little girl whose only sibling, a brother nine years older, disappeared without a trace one day while surfing, after which his mother came to hate the surviving child for living, for growing up, for not being frozen in time. And when the song drifted off, the assistant coroner was at her side, both of them peering into eyes stuck in the same gaze forever, eyes that looked through them, beyond them, as if staring up from the farthest depths of the ocean.
“My parents used to go to that beach every year,” Deedra heard herself saying. “They’d bring home all these objects that happened to wash ashore, as if my brother was sending them some secret code—a house full of meaningless wreckage.”
“It must have been a lonely place to grow up.”
“Flotsam and jetsam,” Deedra replied. “That’s my brother and me–one of us accidentally washed into the sea, the other intentionally tossed overboard.”
The assistant coroner studied the impassive face of the corpse. “One of the things we do around here,” she said, “is determine the time of death. But it has always seemed to me that some people die long before their vital functions actually cease.”
Then the tall woman reached over and squeezed Deedra’s hand, a touch as satiny and reassuring as the first sip of a long-awaited drink, a touch that still lingered on her skin the following morning as she sat in a bar at West Palm Beach International Airport, waiting for a delayed flight and finishing off a vodka gimlet. On the TV behind the bar, there was a report on the local news about a man arrested for impersonating a priest, but she wasn’t paying attention, wasn’t thinking about anything but the unbeautiful face of a stranger who wouldn’t even recognize her if they ever were to meet again. And later, after another flight delay and two more drinks, she realized she still had that stranger’s work number on her phone. “Hello? Hello? Who is this?” the person on the other end kept saying, but the caller didn’t respond, just closed her eyes, brought the tumbler to her lips and listened one last time to the calmest voice she’d ever heard.
Three: 2016
Driftwood in all shapes and sizes, doll’s heads, rubber duckies, a small wooden crucifix so seaworn the body of Jesus was smoothed down to a bump—everything into the fire. A thick plume of noxious-smelling smoke was rising over the neighborhood where she’d grown up in Kalamazoo, a black streak through the golden autumn sky. Sooner or later somebody would call the police, but for now she was on a roll. Lensless binoculars, long-empty miniature bottles of Dewar’s, a coconut carved with menacing eyes and pointed teeth—more fuel for the burn barrel behind her parents’ place, a house she hadn’t visited since she left at 19, not even for her father’s funeral the previous year or for her mother’s burial a couple of months after that, when she’d missed the plane because she was wasted. A teardrop-shaped pointer from an Ouija board, a teak bookmark in the shape of a dagger, brittle old 78-rpm records bearing names long-forgotten singers—Deedra hadn’t had a drink in four months now, and before she flew out here to get the house ready for sale, her AA sponsor had warned that emotions can be overwhelming in early sobriety and that without the numbing effect of alcohol recovering addicts often experience a powerful sense of anger. What he didn’t say was how magnificent her rage would be, how exhilarating to feel like an exposed nerve, everything as bright and hot and intense as these cascading flames. Chess pieces from unmatched sets all over the world, the maple frame of a gearless, faceless cuckoo clock—she was practically sprinting now between house and blaze, determined to destroy everything, all that random refuse from other people’s lives, other people’s stories. How could her parents have ever imagined that such mismatched bits of beach trash would somehow form a story of their own, a series of clues would lead to their son? Flotsam and jetsam, brother and sister, husband and wife—a plastic wedding figurine joined the inferno, bride and groom instantly hissing into a molten lump. Flotsam and jetsam, flotsam and jetsam—hurling another armful into the blaze, she suddenly remembered one last object, a wooden barber shop pole she hadn’t thought of in years, but now, coughing from the acrid smoke, she could picture it perfectly, the faded stripes, the wood as white and smooth as bone. Rushing inside, she searched everywhere, her brother’s room, her parents’ room, basement, attic, back to her brother’s room, tearing open boxes, emptying drawers onto the floor, the pole nowhere to be found, but now she was in a frenzy, tipping over chairs and yanking framed photographs from the wall of the family room. Her brother on a bicycle before she was born, her brother in a Little League uniform, her brother and some girl she didn’t recognize, dressed up for a high-school dance—it thrilled her to smash the frames, pull the pictures out and watch the images ripple into ash, the lost boy finally disappearing from this house for good. Flotsam and jetsam, flotsam and jetsam, flotsam and jetsam—chanting the words between each breath, she dashed back inside for more pictures, shocked that so many contained her own face, as if she, too, had been missed, as if she, too, had been loved. A little girl on a teeter totter, a little girl curled up with a book, a little girl watching her big brother dangle a stick of marshmallows over this same burn barrel, his presence even then a shadow in the dusk—nothing spared from the blaze. Flotsam and jetsam—it was as if a melody were hidden beneath those words, something like a lullaby, the notes just out of reach. Flotsam and jetsam, flotsam and jetsam—more pictures into the inferno, most combusting instantly but one landing near the edge of the barrel. A little girl sucking her thumb, her chin resting on the shoulder of her mother, whose back was to the camera, holding her baby tight with both arms—Deedra stood there, waiting for the blaze to do its work and staring into the tired eyes of the girl, who suddenly seemed to be staring back. Something like a lullaby, the notes just out of reach—and before she knew it, she was reaching right into the flames, suddenly desperate to save that poor, lonely child.
Four: 2018
A classmate from her Nineteenth Century American Literature course caught up with her as she crossed the campus of the University of New Orleans one February afternoon. “I’ve been meaning to tell you something,” he said. “There’s a woman running around town who looks just like you—hundred percent identical. I keep spotting her from afar.”
The young man flashed a knowing grin. She tried to remember his name. With his ironic clothes, air of studied slovenliness and Abraham Lincoln beard, he reminded her of a tall, emaciated, unwashed leprechaun. In class, he always came in late and plopped down next to her, leaning over to whisper cryptic statements that seemed intended to arouse curiosity, make him seem mysterious and worldly. One thing she hadn’t expected about going back to college at age 27 was that she’d become an object of admiration.
“Are you making this up?” she asked.
“Swear to God, she could be your sister,” he said, ambling off toward the cafeteria. “She’s gorgeous. Maybe even as gorgeous as you. A drop-dead doppelganger.”
They’d been using that word a lot in class. One of the previous week’s assigned readings was Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson,” a story about a drunken young man, estranged from his family and “addicted to the wildest caprices,” who is shadowed by an alter-ego—basically, a better version of himself. The climax comes at a masquerade ball during Carnival in Rome, where the two William Wilsons wind up in a fight to the death, though the story leaves it a mystery which one is murdered and which one survives.
Unlike most of her classmates, who either didn’t bother to read the piece or saw it as “wordy and pretentious,” as one of them put it, she couldn’t get it out of her mind. Although she hadn’t had a drink in close to two years, Deedra often felt that she, too, was locked in a life-and-death battle with another self, the winner still undetermined. Mardi Gras was now underway, a time that made her painfully aware of that previous Deedra, who often seemed more real and alive than the current, sober one. Although vaguely curious about her classmate’s claim, she knew that this was no time for a recovering alcoholic to be wandering the streets in search of some random stranger to whom she bore a supposed resemblance. With the university beginning its spring break to coincide with the holiday, she resolved to lie low and catch up on homework.
She spent the first few days holed up in her Mid-City apartment, drinking Diet Dr. Pepper, watching competitive cooking shows on TV, searching the internet for good deals on vacation spots she never intended to visit like Bali and Myanmar, and attempting to write a paper about the role of ambiguity in Poe’s short story, “The Man of the Crowd.” But late one afternoon, frustrated and bored, she decided to take her work to a local coffee shop on Carrollton Avenue. Finding a table at the front window, she spread out her books, snapped open her laptop and tried to write but almost immediately found it impossible. The laughter of fellow patrons, the clatter of cups, the insistent, tobacco-smoke aroma of chicory-laced coffee, the half-eaten slice of avocado toast gathering dust under a nearby table—all these distractions, which Deedra might not have noticed on a normal day, now seemed to flood her senses with a strange intensity, like light in dilated eyes. She contemplated leaving, but suddenly the dead air of her silent, spotless apartment seemed even more oppressive than the chaos of this cafe. Ordering another cup of coffee, she opened The Complete Tales of Edgar Allan Poe and began to skim through “The Man of the Crowd” one more time, underlining passages at random, but soon became absorbed in contemplation of the scene outside.
Up until this hour, most of the passersby had worn street clothes, walking their dogs or heading home from work or scurrying from one appointment to another in their busy weekday schedules. But with the sun beginning to set, more and more people were sauntering out in costume, their pace slower, their bearing prouder, their gait more purposeful and expressive. A woman in a zoot suit with eight-foot-long pants lurched past on stilts, followed by a man in a monk’s robe, a glow-in-the-dark halo suspended impossibly over his bald scalp, which he seemed to have shaved into a tonsure especially for the occasion. Deedra had always loved the effort New Orleanians expended on these extravagant, hand-crafted getups, all the time and money and planning and passion they put into giving themselves a new identity. Her old self had never felt more at one with the city than in this time of year, when everyone was drunk and everyone was pretending to be someone else. Three years back, she’d gone as the “ghost writer,” a costume she put together by purchasing a second-hand wedding dress and veil, slapping on some white face paint and blood-red lipstick, and walking around with a four-foot-long novelty pencil she’d picked up online. Such an odd alter-ego, she now thought, for someone who never felt in control of events, someone who wasn’t “authoring her own life,” as they sometimes said in AA. But were things really that much better these days? Was she any more in charge, any closer to happiness? Gazing out the window at the growing procession of revelers, she consoled herself that–so far, at least–she’d managed to remain on this side of the glass. And then, on the opposite sidewalk, she spotted a woman of roughly her own height and carriage, walking past in an oversized yellow sweater with a big zigzag black stripe–a sweater Deedra herself had knitted by hand.
Or at least it looked a lot like that sweater, a saggy, lopsided affair she’d undertaken as a means of occupying her mind during one of her many unsuccessful attempts to stop drinking. She’d originally intended it as a Christmas gift for her mother—yet another ill-conceived idea, another ornate exercise in self-hate, which she’d abandoned even before the ugly, ill-fitting item was finished. After wearing it around to the bars one night, during which time it managed to acquire a mysterious red stain (wine? pizza sauce? blood?), she’d banished it to a storage box in her closet. Or had she? Wasn’t it at least possible that while on some spree she’d thrown it out or given it away or donated it to the Salvation Army? Her mind racing with all the improbable ways the sweater might have wound up with a stranger now disappearing down the street, Deedra rose and dashed out the door, not even bothering to collect her laptop or books.
“You,” she shouted. “You in the yellow!”
The woman did not turn, but Deedra thought she recognized something familiar about her stride, something reminiscent of her own way of moving through the world, an aimless sway of the hips. She tried to remember if she’d glimpsed the woman’s face.
“You!” she yelled again, but by now the woman was a full block ahead of her. As the distant silhouette disappeared around the corner, Deedra heard herself letting out a shriek, long and loud and shrill. She couldn’t remember ever letting herself go like that, not even in her worst days of drinking, but she didn’t stop until her lungs were drained.
The door of the coffee shop swung open and her waiter emerged from inside, a pockmarked man wearing a greasy apron and a bemused smile.
“Excuse me, darling,” he said, “but are you planning to pay?”
Humiliated, she dashed back inside, gathered her things, and, after shoving a wad of uncounted cash into the waiter’s hands, rushed to her apartment in search of the sweater, which turned out to be right in the box where she’d remembered putting it–a discovery that filled her with both relief and disappointment. Unfolding the thing, she brought it to her nose and breathed in the unmistakably real smells of mothballs and wool, which seemed to offer some assurance that the last half hour’s events had not been the product of some dream. Then she put the sweater away, returned the box to its proper place, made herself a cup of chamomile tea, opened the laptop, stared at the screen, snapped the computer shut again and headed off in search of her doppelganger.
Yellow sweater, yellow sweater, yellow sweater, yellow sweater—stumbling around the city for days, she never saw anyone dressed that way again. But as Deedra wandered from place to place, Lakeview, City Park, Bayou St. John, Bywater, she kept having moments her Edgar Allan Poe-obsessed English professor might describe as uncanny, moments when she couldn’t be sure whether she was the observer or the observed, the searcher or the one being sought. Was she imagining it or did she keep spotting herself, always at a distance, always in a different guise? At the Krewe of Muses parade, there was a masked figure who blew Deedra a kiss and shouted something unintelligible to her from the famous “sirens” float, decorated with nude statuettes of the mythic sea nymphs who lure mortals to their doom. At the Krewe of Iris parade the next night, she materialized on a different float, this time in bejeweled sunglasses, white evening gloves and a sequined gown topped with a giant, elaborately beaded collar, her tiara pulsating with multicolored lights as she tossed Deedra a souvenir doubloon stamped with the image of a beautiful long-necked woman. In the French Quarter the following day, she emerged once more, the last in a line of seven or eight women pedaling rusty old bikes up Dauphine Street, all of them wearing pink unitards and purple afro wigs. The cyclist seemed surprised to come upon Deedra there, her bike swerving as she glanced back over her shoulder before vanishing around the corner behind the others.
Then, just when she’d convinced herself that these encounters were more than mere happenstance, they stopped. On Lundi Gras–the day before Fat Tuesday–Deedra wandered for hours among crowds gathered along the riverfront for the annual arrival of the Mardi Gras king but didn’t see anyone who looked the least bit like her double. The next morning she was on the streets early for the final day of the celebration but soon saw she was only deluding herself. What were the odds, after all, that the same stranger had appeared in four different guises in four different parts of town on four different days, her face always just out of view? True, in all but the first of these encounters, the woman had seemed to recognize Deedra. But wasn’t this, too, a projection? Hadn’t that been just what she’d craved her whole life—to be recognized?
By late morning, she was overcome by an almost physical exhaustion at being in normal clothes amid this vast sea of masqueraders, an experience that made her feel simultaneously hidden and stripped bare. Her AA sponsor had warned her that sobriety is often accompanied by a profound sense of loneliness, engendered by the loss of friends and behaviors associated with addiction, and that the only way to fight it is to let yourself grieve your old substance-dependent self. So maybe it was just time to abandon this ridiculous search, go home and grieve. Heading back to her apartment, she turned onto Dumaine Street, where she passed a young woman in a Cinderella costume, leaning over and throwing up all over her slippers. It suddenly occurred to Deedra that despite being around inebriated people for days on end, she’d never been tempted to stop for a drink. Not even once. Perhaps this whole insane chase hadn’t been such a waste of time, after all. As she cut through Louis Armstrong Park, somebody shouted her name. She turned to see a tall man in a homemade paper-mache mask that looked like a cruel, smirking baby with pointed ears. His long, lanky strides felt familiar, and as he approached a vivid image of her own brother suddenly shot into her mind, grinning as he loped over to hand her a gift at one of her backyard birthday parties in Kalamazoo.
“Do you know who I am?” he asked.
“Not exactly.”
“A Billiken,” he said, taking off the mask.
It was the boy from her English class.
“I’m guessing you don’t know what a Billiken is,” he continued. “Few people do anymore, which is a shame. Take the 1940 film Waterloo Bridge with Vivian Leigh and Robert Taylor, for example. A Billiken pretty much drives the plot.”
He held out the mask with both hands, as if presenting her with a prize.
“Go ahead,” he said. “Rub it.”
“Is this one of your jokes?”
“No, stupid, it’s juju. That’s what a Billiken does—bring good luck. It's known as The God of Things as They Ought to Be. By the way, I just saw your doppelganger.”
“What? Where?”
Two minutes later she was shoving her way back through the crowd, following the sound of a distant brass band, its song at once mournful and seductive. According to her classmate, the woman in question could now be found wandering around with the St. Anthony Ramblers, a renowned group of locals who held their own informal street parade each Mardi Gras, attracting hundreds of outlandishly costumed marchers. Back in her drinking days, Deedra herself had often taken part in this raucous procession, which made regular stops at local bars as it snaked its way through the French Quarter and the Marigny behind a group of musicians. It was with the Ramblers, in fact, that she’d staggered around in her “ghost writer” getup, stopping random strangers in the street to yell, “You may not know me, motherfucker, but I created you!” But this time it was Deedra who was beginning to feel like a character in someone else’s narrative. As the peal of horns and rumble of drums grew louder, she pictured her irritating classmate chortling with adolescent glee as he watched her rub his mask and dash off in search of a phantasm he’d created for a fiction of his own invention. And then, at the corner of Burgundy and Touro, she found herself staring at a veiled woman in a white wedding dress, holding an oversized pencil like a wizard’s staff.
Same shag haircut, same curtain bangs, same heart-shaped face, same embarrassingly wide shoulders and long arms—as the woman made her way through the crowd, using the pencil as a walking stick, she seemed somehow both conspicuous and ethereal, always standing aside, never interacting with the other elaborately attired revelers, who didn’t even seem aware of her presence. Deedra couldn’t help but think this was all some sort of hallucination, but what did it matter? Was that any reason to stop now? Suddenly, everything seemed imbued with significance, teeming with clues; for the first time, Deedra understood how her parents must have felt as they scoured the beach for signs of their vanished son.
Keeping a safe distance for fear that a face-to-face encounter might break the charm, she vowed that this time, no matter what, she wouldn’t lose sight of the woman, who, after splitting away from the St. Anthony Ramblers in Jackson Square, began to lead Deedra on a meandering adventure, sometimes speeding up, sometimes slowing down, sometimes doubling back, sometimes circling an entire block two or three times with no apparent purpose, then rushing forward as if late for an appointment. Hours seemed to blur and familiar landmarks became unreal. The unoccupied houses, covered with vines; the long-abandoned Municipal Auditorium; the empty skyscraper that was once the Plaza Tower Hotel; the shuttered Market Street Power Plant by the river, its twin smokestacks looming over the pilgrim and her guide—Deedra had never given much thought to these ruins, but suddenly they seemed part of an incomprehensible otherworld that the wanderers were traversing, outside the here and now. Was the ghost writer leading her backward or forward in time? She gave no indication, never even glancing back as she traced a serpentine path through the Lower Garden District and around the fountain in Coliseum Square Park, then to St. Charles Avenue, where the citrusy smell of sweet olive trees hung in the air like a cloud of hashish. Here the ghost writer seemed to speed up, gliding with inexplicable ease over sidewalks strewn with beer cans, plastic cups and discarded Mardi Gras beads. Polymnia, Euterpe, Terpsichore—in an effort to keep up, Deedra found herself racing across a series of sidestreets, which, it suddenly occurred to her, were named after the muses, those guiding spirits she’d studied in her Introduction to Classical Mythology course. Melpomene, Thalia—she was sprinting now, weaving wildly through the crowd, then slamming into and nearly knocking over a pair of elderly masqueraders dressed as conjoined twins in an oversized salmon-colored sport coat. Pushing past them without a word, she spotted the ghost writer darting around the corner of Erato Street. By the time Deedra arrived, there was no one in sight.
She stood breathless, terrified that the spell had been shattered. On one side of the street was an upscale apartment complex, its gated parking lot lined with palm trees, on the other a law firm, closed for the holiday, then a restaurant, The Nine Maidens Cafe, to which she now dashed, no ghost writer at the front door (where Deedra saw only her own her own shadowy reflection in the glass), no ghost writer in the lobby (where she squinted into the dark interior of a sleepy tourist spot, the walls lined with posters of oversized fleurs-de-lis and generic jazz musicians and insipid slogans such as “Grooving NOLA-style”), no ghost writer in the bar area or in the dining room or in the women’s room or in the men’s room (where she barreled in on a surprised patron at the urinal), no ghost writer in the kitchen (where she was cursed at in Spanish by the chef and escorted out by an elfin, unsmiling busboy who, assuming she was drunk, gently led her back to the front of the house). The place was about half-full, most of the customers obviously out-of-towners dressed in cheap Mardis Gras T-shirts and other mass-produced accessories. Some were exhausted revelers, thick strings of plastic beads around their necks, dazed looks in their puffy eyes, half-finished hurricane cocktails in their hands. Others appeared to have never started partying or to have given up several days ago, as if they’d come to the café exclusively for the early bird special.
Deedra turned to one of those sober-looking patrons, a woman sitting alone at the bar in front of a cup of coffee, a plate of french fries and an open laptop.
“Did anyone come in here just now?” she asked.
“Not sure,” the woman replied, without looking up from her computer.
“She would have been wearing a wedding dress and carrying a giant pencil,” Deedra explained, spreading her arms wide to show the size of the object.
“Ah. Well, I probably would’ve noticed that,” the woman said, flashing a sympathetic smile. “So I’m guessing the answer is no.”
“I’ve got to find her,” Deedra said, less to the stranger than to herself, a wave of despair overtaking her as she hurried across the room to the front door.
“Good luck with your search.”
The voice came from behind her, the calmest voice she’d ever heard.
Pressing her palm against the cool brass of the door handle, Deedra hesitated, then turned back to the woman at the bar. The face was not animated or exotic, not even beautiful, really. Yet there was something about her, a presence that felt familiar.
“Do we know each other?” Deedra said.
“In my case, that question is more complicated than you might think,” the woman replied with an unhurried laugh. “But anything is possible.”
In the years to come, when the two women would tell this story—their story, the unlikely tale which brought them together—that last sentence would be the punchline. The assistant coroner would usually start the yarn by recalling that her decision to visit New Orleans had been impulsive and last-minute, brought on by the fact that an elderly aunt was sick with pneumonia. She only happened to be in The Nine Maidens Cafe because it was around the corner from her aunt’s house and had good internet. The two lovers would then share an intimate glance before Deedra would launch into the long litany of improbabilities that brought her though the door that day, a tale she often spiced up with details she hadn’t considered at the time—the fact that the Mardi Gras parade in which the ghost writer materialized got its name from the patron saint of lost things, for example, or that the street where the ghost writer disappeared and the assistant coroner reappeared was named after the muse of mimic imitation, erotic poetry and wedding songs. Then, after the women recounted their meeting at the bar and explained what it meant to have face blindness, they'd end with the assistant coroner’s punchline, which would often make listeners gasp with delight: But anything is possible.
In their telling, it was a story of fate—two people who were destined to be together despite unimaginable odds. Deedra would come to believe that human beings yearn for such narratives—tales of chance meetings and missed connections and unexpected reunions, tales of synchronicities and premonitions and happy endings, presided over by the Billiken, God of Things as They Ought to Be. But Deedra knew that destiny was a lie. She would never mention this, not even to the assistant coroner, but for the rest of her life she would always be standing at that door, studying the woman on the other side of the restaurant. Anything was possible. Perhaps the ghost writer was some sort of supernatural muse who had led her here to meet her future or perhaps she was a figment of Deedra’s imagination or perhaps she was just some arbitrary person who happened to be wandering around in a meaningless costume, headed for no place in particular. Perhaps Deedra would introduce herself to the woman across the bar, or perhaps she’d simply vanish, just as her brother had, just as her mother had, just as she’d always done, just as all her instincts were screaming out for her to do at that very moment. Turning to the door, she looked for her own reflection in the glass, but the face staring back was still just a shadow, the object of her search once again out of view.
